sisterhood is…

Apologies for the lack of posting today! A GWP anomaly, and I missed you all!

I spent the day traveling to Washington DC, where my intergenerational feminist panel spoke tonight at George Washington University before the Women’s Leadership Program–and an amazing group of women those WLPers are. Pictures coming soon. Tomorrow, we’re keynoting at the Association for Women in Communications conference, and I’m excited to attend some of their sessions (and swim in the hotel pool) as well.

More from me tomorrow, I promise!

The Feminist Press’ Gloria Jacobs and Feministing.com’s Courtney Martin Discuss Sarah Palin from Brian Lehrer Live on Vimeo.

Nicely done.

So the intergenerational feminist panel I travel with, “Women Girls and Ladies”, is presenting at George Washington University next Thurs (Sept 25, 6pm) and at the Association for Women in Communications conference next Fri (Sept 26, luncheon keynote). At GW, we’ll be doing our “what made me a feminist” version, and at AWC, we’ll be specifically talking about communicating among women across generations at work. The panelists are: Gloria Feldt, Kristal Brent-Zook, Courtney Martin, and me. I love traveling with these ladies. And speaking of Courtney, stay tuned for a guest post from her here at GWP next week….

For anyone in the DC area, thanks in advance for any help spreading the word about these events!

So surprise, surprise: In spite of the Palin-o-mania that seems to have taken this screwy nation of ours by storm, it appears not all women of Alaska all agree. Check out WaPo’s coverage of the Palin Protest held in Anchorage, and the footage posted on YouTube, above. Some memorable slogans from the march:

Bush in a Skirt
Jesus Was a Community Organizer
Palin: Thanks But No Thanks
Smearing Alaska’s Good Name One Scandal @ a Time
Candidate To Nowhere
Rape Kits Should Be Free
Barbies for War
Sarah Palin: So Far Right She’s Wrong
Coat Hangers for McCain
Sarah Palin, Undoing 150 Years of American Feminism
Hockey Mama For Obama
McPalin Out of My Uterus

Some of the protesters–in particular, two organizers of a group named Alaska Women Reject Palin–have received threatening and abusive phone calls, instigated by KBYR talk radio host Eddie Burke, who shared the names and phones numbers of the two contacts on-air. More about all that here.

And meanwhile, Women Against Sarah Palin put up a blog asking women to send in their thoughts about Sarah Palin and have received a whopping 120,000 responses.

Keep an eye out for a post here at GWP soon on what all this “Women Against” business is REALLY about.

A particularly sassy takedown by Salon’s Cintra Wilson: “Pissed about Palin.”

A thoughtful (yes, thoughtful) analysis by Camille Paglia of Palin as a muscular, pioneer-inspired “feminist” force: “Fresh Blood for the Vampire.”

Kaye S. Hymowitz at City Journal on “Red State Feminism.”

Dahlia Litwick in Newsweek on how “Palin Signals Fewer Choices for Women.”

The LA Times on “Hiding Sarah Palin Behind ‘Deference.'”

HuffPo on how “Sex Sells in the GOP.”

A NYTimes article on how the second mixed-sex major-party presidential ticket in American history has nonetheless raised 21st-century questions about etiquette, body language and who hugs first: “To Have (as a Running Mate), and Hold (Politely).”

And an amusing comparison of Palin (who is now, yes, an action figure) to a minor character in Star Wars named Boba Fett by my very clever husband dude Marco.

Other recs of what we should be reading? Please post links in comments.

A few quick hits for ya’ll this morning:

Sisters, This Is an Election We Can’t Sit Out, says the Rev. Valda Combs in a piece for Women’s eNews, urging Hillary supporters, who have reason to be bitter about the primary, have to pull it together. The most vulnerable women in our society need our unity too much.

The Center for New Words launches a new election season project, This Is What Women Want!

And Girls, Incorporated launches the Dear World public education campaign in which girls express their daily realities, hopes, fears, and dreams in 30- and 60-second television spots and a website.

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So I’m finishing up a report this week on media coverage of race, gender, class, and age in the 2008 primaries. And I’m so jazzed by Gina McCauley’s Michelle Obama Watch and what I’ve learned about it so far that it merits another post. And another, and another to be sure.

I corresponded with Gina yesterday and learned that there have been over 90,000 page views in the 20 days since the site’s been up. A recent piece about MOW in The Baltimore Sun tentatively asks “Michele Obama Ties Black, White Women?” and notes, “Gina McCauley’s blog on African-American women in pop culture has never attracted this kind of attention. But she launched a new Michelle Obama Watch blog in June to monitor and critique media coverage of the potential first lady, and since then, feminists of all colors have been linking and commenting.”

The solidarity is key, and Gina knows it’s about something more. As she wrote to me in an email:

“[T]his ultimately isn’t about Michelle Obama, it is an exercise in how the nation, the news media and entertainment industry in particular, an deal or not deal with an African American women who defies the dominant stereotypes perpetuated about us. If we let them get away with their chicanery with a Harvard-educated attorney, then the next Black woman to walk in her footsteps would have to to trod a more difficult path.”

Hells yes.

The site currently has 13 volunteer contributors who have contributed 88 posts. Got a news tip for the site? Direct your concerns, complaints, or praise about the media’s treatment of Michele Obama to michelleobamawatch@gmail.com. And watch for more from Gina over at What about Our Daughters, which has received credentials to cover the 2008 Democratic National Convention in August.

When I was writing my book Sisterhood, Interrupted, I knew that my manuscript submission deadline was to be but an arbitrary end. I could have kept writing and writing and writing. Because mama drama (Chapter 5) is a story that just doesn’t quit.

In a recent issue of The Daily Mail, Rebecca Walker writes, “My mother may be revered by women around the world – goodness knows, many even have shrines to her. But I honestly believe it’s time to puncture the myth and to reveal what life was really like to grow up as a child of the feminist revolution.” Rebecca is a colleague of mine, and a peer. She contributed an essay to my anthology Only Child. I’m saddened to hear, as she reveals in The Mail, that she’s having trouble conceiving a second of her own. But publicly blaming her mother, and through her mother, flaming feminism, seems extreme.

Like Rebecca, I’m starting my journey to motherhood later. Had it not been for feminism, I might have stayed married to a first husband who was wrong for me (we divorced). Had it not been for feminism, and more specifically, the Pill, I might have conceived in my early twenties, a time when I was still growing up myself and would have failed miserably at motherhood. And let’s face it: had it not been for feminism, I would not be a writer publishing feminist articles and books–including some that question and critique the movement’s hot contentions and debates.

Like Rebecca, I too have had my share of conflict with my mother. We’ve screamed, fought, brought each other to our therapists, and duked it out. My mother is not a famous feminist, and to be sure she’s been ever present in my life–perhaps unlike Alice Walker in that regard, according to Rebecca’s account. My mother was overly available, and therein our troubles began. As one of the writers in our Only Child anthology puts it, sometimes we onlies can long for neglect.

Yes, my mother-daughter troubles were of the fixable variety. Perhaps Rebecca and Alice’s are not, and perhaps it is unfair for me to even compare. The personal is by all means political; when your mother is Alice Walker, no doubt those boundaries are bound to slide. But when Rebecca writes that “Feminism has much to answer for denigrating men and encouraging women to seek independence whatever the cost to their families,” I fear she is revealing far less about a movement and more about herself.

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Oh boy, I gotta jump in over at Slate’s XX Factor — and likely will — but just wanted to share this article by Dahlia Litwik with ya’ll, called We Need To Talk, which concludes:

[I]n the spirit of reconciliation, I’d ask our mothers and grandmothers to take another look at the young feminists of 2008—supporters of Clinton and Obama alike. We’ve got money we earned—not by pole-dancing for the most part—and we’ve chosen to spend it on political candidates! Not shoes! (Or at least on political candidates and shoes.) We are smart and educated and politically engaged. We are passionate about repairing the world for your grandkids and goofily confident that those same granddaughters will be someday number among the joint chiefs of staff and the National League pennant winners. And wasn’t that at the core of your dream for us? You are not invisible. But we are not blind. And maybe now’s not the best time to confess to this but these rose-colored glasses we’ve been wearing since January? We borrowed them from you. …

And for another generational take, do check out Linda Hirshman’s piece in The Washington Post, “Looking to the Future, Feminism Has to Focus”, in which Hirshman cites my fellow PWVers Gloria Feldt and Sonia Osario as well as feminist bloggers Jessica Valenti and Jill Filipovic.

Your thoughts?

(Thanks, Marco, for the heads up on Slate.)

I’ve spent much of April saying yes to saying no. After a grueling (but wildly fun) March, April 1st commenced my month of slowing-it-down. I said no to coffee, no to many events, and no, ultimately, to all the things that distract me from getting my writing done. But when my colleagues at the Women’s Media Center sent over a comped invite to a panel at The Paley Center for Media last Thursday, I jumped. Just couldn’t pass up a chance to hear ladies like Gloria Steinem, Suzanne Braun Levine, Mary Thom, Patricia Mitchell, Carol Jenkins, and Marlene Sanders pontificate on women, media, and politics, “From Bella to Hillary,” as it were.

Listening to the panel was a great cap to the speaking I’ve been doing of late with my fellow WomenGirlsLadies. It confirmed and inspired.

Confirmed: Women in this country have a long, long way to go. (We’re 71st in the world in terms of representation of women in positions of political power; we occupy a whopping 3% of the clout positions in media over here, oh boy.) The program included a clip from an early women’s movement documentary, “The Hand That Rocks the Ballot Box,” and much of the cry then is the same as it is now. As Lily Tomlin proclaimed in another clip from a 1992 PSA that was shown, women in this country have a better chance of getting into another galaxy then Congress–where, in 2008, we’re still only at 16%.

Inspired: Gloria Steinem spoke of the variety and differences within the women’s movement, and how we’re still dealing with a lack of full and nuanced tellings when it comes to telling the story of that movement’s past. “First a movement is a hula hoop,” she said. It’s ridiculed by the press, and then it quickly becomes Not News. What was missed in that cursory coverage, she noted, was the role women of color played in shaping the movement of the ’60s and ’70s. Take Fannie Lou Hamer, a founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus and the first woman to come forward against forced steralization. While Hamer is remembered as a Civil Rights movement champion of voter registration, her role in the women’s movement is underplayed.

“Whitemiddleclass became like one key on the typewriter, used to devalue the women’s movement in the media at large,” said Steinem. And that’s the version we next-generation feminists imbibed wholesale too, I might add. I’m looking forward to the forthcoming scholarship that’s bound to unleash a wider range of tellings, scholarship I know from various sources is well underway.

During the Q&A, I asked panelists for their thoughts on how we might capitalize on the outrage women feel about how Hillary has been treated by the media. It’s an outrage transcends candidate support and transcends age. No clear answers emerged, but all agreed that we need to channel it into harnessing votes against the hardly-woman-friendly John McCain. I look forward to figuring that out together as the general election nears.